Page 1 of Jailer to the Death God
1
The girl in my bed is going to die.
She’s in the final stage of the plague, the phase from which no one ever recovers. Her eyelids swelled shut hours ago, and dried pus is crusted at the seams where her lashes used to be. Her hair is gone, including her eyebrows.
I was lucky. When I had the plague, my hair didn’t fall out. It turned a silvery white.
Some of the plague victims recover. Like me.
Why did I survive, when so many don’t?
Why me, and not her?
This girl, this precious girl.
She giggled with me in the shade-dappled grass, when she and Rose and I were fifteen, and we skipped out on combat training so we could read salacious books and munch salmon-paste sandwiches in the palace gardens.
She danced with me at my twenty-first birthday celebration, three years ago.
I used to wonder if our friendship might turn into more. And then she found her partner, her Thistle, right around the same time I realized that in most cases, I prefer men in my bed.
Thistle died last week. And this girl—this precious friend, my Leilani—she cared for Thistle right until the end.
Her love killed her. And I hate it for that.
Her skin is papery, fragile, stretched over boils and spotted with sickly white.
I find two fingers that aren’t as afflicted, where my touch won’t cause her too much pain, and I wrap my own fingers around them.
“Leilani.” My voice is taut cords, fraying, speckled with blood and dread. “Leilani, I’m here.”
It’s all I can say. All I can do.
Be here.
Both the palace healers died near the beginning of the plague, four months ago. They tried so hard to save our people, but the amount of energy required to purge even one person of this virulent disease was too much. It was practically a life for a life. They died being their beautiful, generous, compassionate selves, after draining their energy to the dregs for my father, and then my stepmother, and then my older brother, and then—
I can’t count how many beloved souls I have lost. It would break me to enumerate them all. Friends, family, servants, guards—and so many more beyond the palace gates.
I was crowned in a somber ceremony just three weeks ago, on the day after Aspen’s death. Aspen, my brave big brother, who took to his role with a single fierce purpose—to conquer this plague and save our people.
He died in agony, wracked by what he believed to be his own failure.
When will this end?
It must end.
“Vale.” A sharp voice at my bedroom door.
I twist around, my stomach dropping. “Rose?”
She stands in the doorway, a lean, spare woman my age—intense dark eyes, ebony skin, and the coils of silver-white hair that mark her as a survivor.
Her tone, her face—they’re blades, edged with hope. But there can’t be any hope left, can there? All the news I’ve had lately is wretched—death, and more death. Famine, because no one can work. The plague has eaten its way through our countryside, too, not just our cities.
“Vale, I found it.” Rose holds out a book that is barely a book—just a collection of yellow crackling pages stitched together with coarse thread and a cracked binding. “It’s the ritual you need. The one for summoning Arawn.”
Gently I squeeze Leilani’s fingers and lay her hand down. I get to my feet—and nearly topple over. Since I had Leilani moved to my room, I’ve been sitting at her bedside for hours, waving away any servants who offered me food, only accepting the public statements and supply release forms and emergency measures I need to sign. Even in my grief, I am Queen, and I have duties to fulfill.
